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Let our people find a new meaning in the divine oracle which declares that “a little child shall lead them,” for our own little children will soon control the destinies of the Republic.

My countrymen, we do not now differ in our judgment concerning the controversies of past generations, and fifty years hence our children will not be divided in their opinions concerning our controversies. They will surely bless their fathers and their fathers’ God that the Union was preserved, that slavery was overthrown, and that both races were made equal before the law. We may hasten or we may retard, but we can not prevent, the final reconciliation.

Garfield would continue espousing such views throughout his short presidency, notably in a speech at the Hampton Institute on June 4, 1881.

But that occasion at Hampton, almost exactly twenty years after the first contrabands’ liberation, would be his last public address. Less than a month later, as he walked through Washington’s train station on his way to a summer holiday with his family, Garfield was shot by a mentally deranged man, Charles Guiteau. The president lingered throughout the summer in great physical pain—as much from the inept medical care he received as from the wounds themselves—before dying on September 19.

He was succeeded by Chester Arthur, who showed little of his predecessor’s interest in achieving racial justice. James Garfield’s inaugural prophecy would wait much longer than fifty years to be fulfilled.

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Exhausted mentally and physically by his ordeal at Fort Sumter, Robert Anderson was never able to file an official report on the bombardment and surrender. He was appointed brigadier general in May 1861 and briefly commanded Union forces in his native Kentucky, but for reasons of health was relieved from active duty that October. He died at Nice, France, in 1871.

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After being spurned by Jefferson Davis in his attempts to win a high post in the rebel government, Louis T. Wigfall joined the Confederate Congress and became Davis’s fiercest political foe. In March 1865, he strongly opposed the Confederates’ last-ditch attempt to stem the tide of defeat by conscripting blacks into military service. He fled to Texas in May of that year, hoping to continue the struggle by leading Southern troops across the Rio Grande into Mexico.

When this plan failed to materialize, Wigfall left for England, where he spent the next five years attempting to restart the war by first provoking hostilities between the United States and Great Britain. He finally returned to Texas and died of apoplexy in 1874.8

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The dead at First Bull Run included Noah Farnham, Elmer Ellsworth’s successor as commander of the New York Fire Zouaves. Already sick with typhoid, Farnham was wounded by a Confederate bullet and died several days later. After the battle, the Zouaves were scapegoated in the press for the Union defeat and ridiculed as cowards; the flashy uniforms of the firemen soldiers became (and for some historians, remain) symbols of the early pride and folly of the Northern side. A few weeks after the battle, when the Zouaves’ regimental flags—the same ones they had paraded so proudly down Broadway that spring—were found abandoned on a trash heap in Alexandria, it was the unit’s final humiliation. By autumn, more than half the men had deserted, and a few months later, the regiment officially disbanded.

The following year, an attempt was made to reconstitute it under the command of a new colonel, Henry O’Brien. Not long after O’Brien began enlisting fresh Zouave recruits from among the fire b’hoys, the New York draft riots broke out, and he was among those murdered by the mob, tortured and hanged from a lamppost. Ellsworth’s unlucky regiment was never resurrected again.

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In September 1861, Jessie Benton Frémont traveled alone by train from St. Louis to Washington to meet with President Lincoln. Ten days earlier, her husband, as the Union military commander in Missouri, had issued an edict